Imagine this: You’re in the middle of a packed music festival. The network’s jammed, the Wi-Fi’s trash, and your entire group has just disappeared while you were waiting in line for a tequila soda lime.
Normally, that would mean wandering blind through a sea of bucket hats and glowsticks. But Jack Dorsey—Twitter’s bearded, Bitcoin-touting co-founder—has a new solution. And it doesn’t involve the internet at all.
Enter BitChat, Dorsey’s latest experiment: a messaging app that ditches everything we associate with modern communication—no Wi-Fi, no mobile data, no phone numbers, no central servers. Just you, your phone, and the invisible web of Bluetooth signals bouncing between strangers like digital smoke signals.
It sounds like something straight out of Blade Runner 2049, but if the theory has any merit to it, it’s actually kind of genius and novel.
BitChat, which dropped its beta version on Apple’s TestFlight this week is built on Bluetooth mesh networking—a way for nearby devices to talk to each other without relying on any external infrastructure. Think peer-to-peer, but in physical space. As users move around, their phones form temporary clusters, passing encrypted messages through the crowd. Messages can hop from one device to another, with some phones acting as “bridges” that extend the range beyond a single connection—up to 300 metres, or nearly a thousand feet.
And here’s the kicker: nothing is stored on a server. There are no phone numbers, no logins, and no data collection. Messages are ephemeral by design and disappear unless intentionally saved. The app also supports password-protected group chats (called “rooms”) and will soon include WiFi Direct, allowing even broader communication without touching the cloud.
Dorsey calls BitChat a “personal experiment,” but it’s very much aligned with the direction he’s been headed since leaving Twitter’s top job in 2021—building tools that resist surveillance, centralisation, and Big Tech’s increasingly tight grip on our digital lives.
BitChat didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Its launch feels like a pointed response to a growing sense of digital fragility—where governments throttle internet access during protests, platforms ban users at scale, and powerful parties with a seat at the table constantly decide what we get to watch and what we don’t. In a climate like this, where governments are now checking our social media accounts as part of a visa application process, this encrypted texting network seems like a lifeline.
Apps like FireChat were famously used during the Hong Kong protests of 2014, allowing demonstrators to coordinate even as networks were shut down. BitChat seems to build on that same principle: strong communication for unstable times. Whether it’s censorship, natural disasters, or just a brutally bad signal, this app is designed to keep working when everything else fails.
It also taps into a cultural undercurrent—digital minimalism, off-grid romanticism, the dream of disappearing from the matrix while still keeping your group chat alive. For a generation that’s grown weary of being surveilled, BitChat is the kind of low-key, high-encryption rebellion that actually makes sense.
BitChat feels like an extension of Dorsey’s slow-motion reinvention. Since stepping down from Twitter (and distancing himself from Bluesky, the decentralised platform he helped kickstart), he’s doubled down on privacy-forward, anti-establishment tech. As CEO of Block, he’s poured energy into Bitcoin infrastructure. His backing of Damus, a decentralised social app, and his disillusionment with traditional platforms paint a clear picture: this is a man on a mission to decentralise everything.
Is BitChat a niche tool for crypto geeks and digital hermits? Maybe. Or maybe it’s a quiet glimpse of what the internet could look like when the internet goes dark.
Whether BitChat becomes a mainstream hit or remains a footnote in Dorsey’s off-grid saga doesn’t really matter. What it represents—a rejection of centralisation, an embrace of ephemeral tech, a return to local, physical connection—is far more compelling. Of course, we don’t know the downsides to it yet. Whether we like to admit it or not, it’s still surveillance to some extent that also helps us be safe in an ever-growing, restless world.
